Showing posts with label original. Show all posts
Showing posts with label original. Show all posts

Monday, March 22, 2010

I thought I was unique and original...

A few days ago, I informed you of my laziness and my way of buttering my toast. I thought I was being clever, unique and absolutely original.

Today, I did a search for the words "Butter Slicer" on Google and it turned up literally thousands and thousands of hits with a price range from € 1 to € 650. Some sets made from sterling silver were priced as high as € 10000!

The butter slicers on the web fell into 3 categories.


From Jacob's Blog


The first is a series of wires are strung across a frame which could cut the butter into slices, not very thin, but manageable. Various designs have been developed. I am sure that quite a bit of force would be required to cut through a frozen block of butter. Not OK for a single Breakfast eater!


From Jacob's Blog

The second is a One Click butter slicer in which the butter block is loaded into the machine, and when a click is executed, a small square of butter is put onto your toast. About two slices for one toast. A nice neat idea and obviously patented and doing well as the company has its own web site with video, etc.


From Jacob's Blog


The third idea is to use a butter knife which had a sharp edged slot in the centre of the cutting edge. With it you could slice out a piece of butter from a block. Looks good, but I could see various pitfalls in using this type of device.

Of course, it is obvious there are several lazy people like me who have been using their cheese slicers as butter slicers.

Of all the ideas, my feeling is that the cheese slicer serves the purpose more uniquely than the other ideas!

Just goes to show that nothing is unique in this world!

Maybe I should share some of my other unique ideas with you which have not yet seen the light of day. And believe you me, Annikki came up with the rough potato scrubbing glove idea way way back (maybe 40 years ago!). It is now a common product on store shelves! I did not laugh at it when she told me the idea, but I could not believe that nobody had thought of it earlier!

But some of my unique ideas have now seen the light of day or are going to, in the very near future.  Of course, I can claim all sorts of inventions as mine, but the proof is whether I have the patent. I have not, so it is no use crying over split milk! But in my heart of hearts, I can say that I had plenty of great ideas over the years, as has Annikki!